Related

27 comments on “Adrie Kusserow: Anthropocene Lullaby”

This stunning poem’s haunting imagery and essential truths speak perfectly to this moment in time. It calls all of us to pay attention, to be still, to stop buying, to stop wasting, and lean into the beauty that is this world. As it speaks of degradation of the earth, the poem’s beauty guides us to replacing anger with the beauty and clarity required to bring about the shift in our collective consciousness that will set humans back on a path to sustainability. Heartfelt thanks for putting this onto paper.

We all hear that “Thou shall not bear false witness,” and yet, when it comes to facing the so-called “Anthropocene,” bearing false witness is exactly what 99% of humanity seems to more than willing to do. Not so this poem. Here, in a style and tone that reminds me of Robinson Jeffers’s “November Surf,” (oh Jeffers, who, from his stone-built tower overlooking the violent Pacific, also gazed out at the world of human hubris and folly with a similarly lyric steeliness and clarity), Kusserow asks us to consider, finally, if even for a moment, a total acceptance:

“What’s done is done. For once, stop moving.

Let yourself be still as the arctic blue.”

What follows is a brief but altogether immersive incantation of what we’ve known all along– that this whole endeavor of Western civilization has been fatally flawed since long before we all showed up. Here the details of our ow uninspiring detritus shows up as it does in our own local environments: in waves of a minor ugliness that we’ve learned to ignore, despite, or because of, their ubiquity-– which together create the big ugliness. That some of these plastic idols become food to gulls is one of the most powerful, and truthful, images in this or any poem on the matter. I winced and nodded and signed aloud, my own ribs aching like a poisoned gull’s.

As for the final stanzas, well, I am in their grasp and am looking through them, even if my own temperament tends to keep my rose-colored reading glasses on when I think about the future habitability of this planet. And while I grow uneasy here, Kusserow offers us an almost Mary Oliver-like invitation :

“You only have to be ready to crouch, to be humble.”

This poem leaves me wondering just how much more often we should be bearing truthful witness to the fraying threads of our once thriving world, to just stop rushing around praying aloud or partying loud and instead just being still, being humble, and letting something like this earthen, weary wisdom settle into my own bones for a minute or a day.

So why is this a great poem? Because Kusserow is helping me stay in this truth, and helping me say what I’d often rather not: “What’s done is done.”

And yet, I also suspect another wisdom hidden further back in this poem somewhere–– that somehow, in contemplating and even hearing the silence of our own “oblivion,” we can return to our senses with a renewed freedom from thinking that any cute, Hollywood resolution to this mess awaits us, because it doesn’t.

I don’t know what *does* await us, and neither does Kussserow here in this poem. What I do know: I feel more inclined to gaze even more directly, if perhaps more solemnly, at this world’s suffering than I was able to before devouring and digesting this poem. I just can’t say that about many poems, and I can’t say any of these things about many poets.

“Scientific consensus” is the typical attempt to bring climate change skeptics on board the truth train of global warming’s existence. Trouble is, it has been woefully unsuccessful. A different, and much more convincing approach might be to have skeptics read Kusserow’s Anthropocen Lullaby. As usual, Kusserow’s words are penetrating…deeply. In this case they just might penetrate the cracks of the deniers’ tribal recalcitrance. Words that are both powerful and lachrymose.

Remarkable vision of today’s nightmare, not locked in the past, not what is to come. In an unassuming way Kusserow has the courage to look at things as they are, to see the horror as it is. Climate change has, for me, never been as vivid and specific, has never come home as fully, in image upon image, as it does in Kusserow’s verse. So painterly, remind of Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel the Elder. Thank you,
Adrie.

What Can I say? Adrie’s poetry is ALIVE, RAW and REAL. For someone like myself, with no grasp of such other worldly words, Adrie’s poetry gives life to what I feel in my bones and the cells of my body. She lets me experience feelings that I have, but can never, in my life, ever speak. What artistry, what beauty, what a way to write about the havoc that humanity has created, and YET, there is no bitterness. How does she do that?

I have long been impressed with Adrie Kusserow’s beautifully wrought poems; her powerful images have a way of lodging themselves in your brain–even as you find yourself savoring the sonorous lyricism of each well-crafted line. “Anthropocene Lullaby” is the kind of poem that should be read aloud–pondered deeply–shared with people you care about. “Let yourself be still as the arctic blue,” Kusserow urges in her poem, and contemplate the graphic scene that has already unfolded around you: dripping glaciers, bony polar bears, serpent-like “waves of wealth” that rise up “hooded, lashing,” only to recede leaving “tiny husks and exoskeletons of greed” that paradoxically “glisten . . . like jewels” in testimony to the anthropocene center that cannot hold. Kusserow’s sonorous lullaby piles up those images of staggering waste that we’ve unleashed like anarchy upon our world, but surely, she reminds us, we’ve seen this coming. And of course, this is the truth of Kusserow’s message: Edgy, squirm[ing], anxiously “out of balance,” we are nonetheless powerless “under evolution’s rule.”
“Be ready . . . be humble,” we are told.
More than any other lyric prophecy I know of, “Anthropocene Lullaby” urges exactly the kind of humility that not deserves our intensive contemplation, but may finally be the message that helps us, finally, to walk in the truth of who we are.

This beautiful poem radiates pure language that rises, that brings the reader to a place in poetic nirvana. Kusserow is one of my very favorite poets. I love how she intertwines the spiritual, the natural, the earthly. Kusserow’s work is stunning! Thank you for this poem!

An amazing poem that makes vivid and livid and languid the urgent nothingness of real life with climate change. I am so sick of the hopeless, hopeful despair of reading about it. And yet this poem makes everything alive again so that we can see anew the dying and the beautiful. Brilliant.